by Peter Robb
* * *
ALL THAT afternoon I pondered The Kiss. I went back to the rabbit warren hotel and lay on my back in a darkened room, breathing in the smell of roasting coffee and raking over memories of body language in the Mezzogiorno. It is not a crime to kiss the boss of Cosa Nostra, Orlando had said that morning. Very bad taste, yes, but not a crime. Ça manque de bon ton. Orlando was merely correcting an emphasis. He knew very well it was no ordinary kiss. He knew as well as anyone how much more was involved. Like most of the rest of the story, the kiss was a men’s affair. It was exchanged, if at all, in 1987. Eight years later it was occupying the finest and most highly paid legal minds in Italy. A moment of physical intimacy was witnessed, recalled, denied, hypothesized, contextualized, theorized, reconstructed and deconstructed. It had led the legal minds to call on others, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, students of the ways of power and affection. The aim was always the same, to establish in principle, after the manner of Italian intellectuals, that it could or could not ever have taken place. And thus that it did or did not take place in 1987. A lot of history hung on this kiss.
In 1987, in the heat of another Palermo September, the Sicilian DC had held that year’s annual Friendship Festival. It was a sort of regional fair of the ruling party that ran for a week from the nineteenth to the twenty-seventh. It’d been well known for months before that the Hon. Andreotti would be coming to Palermo to take part and he was awaited with excitement. For nearly twenty years the alliance with Salvo Lima had made Palermo the heartland of Andreotti’s power. On the second day of the festival, in fact, he was scheduled to speak twice. At ten-thirty in the morning he would be speaking on Europe, Sicily and the Countries of the Mediterranean Basin. After lunch, at three in the afternoon, he would speak on Overcoming Ideological Thinking and the Risk of Mere Pragmatism in Political Alignments. This second speaking engagement was later put off until six in the evening. The dog days of the Sicilian summer were barely over, and someone may have suggested to the organizers that the theme was a little heavy to handle straight after lunch.
Andreotti duly flew to Palermo on September 20, and duly spoke at the party festival that morning. Then he went to the Villa Igiea, his usual hotel when he came to Palermo, a temple of art nouveau built on the water and that day crowded with demochristian politicians. At lunch time Andreotti dismissed his police security escort, and arranged to meet them later in the afternoon. He didn’t in fact join his fellow politicians for lunch in the hotel restaurant, and his absence was noted. Nobody saw him again until he reappeared in the late afternoon and met up again with his escort. Andreotti had left the Villa Igiea at half past two in the afternoon. In another part of Palermo at exactly the same time, Salvatore Riina’s driver Baldassare Di Maggio was collecting the head of Cosa Nostra as instructed from a prearranged address. Di Maggio arrived smartly dressed, as Riina had told him to. He drove Riina in a white VW Golf turbo to the gracious home of Ignazio Salvo in No 3, piazza Vittorio Veneto.
Ignazio Salvo and his cousin and business partner Nino Salvo, who’d died of a brain tumour in a Swiss clinic a year earlier, had been for decades two of the richest businessmen and most powerful demochristians in Sicily. Ignazio Salvo was at home that day in 1987 because he was under house arrest, awaiting sentence in the maxitrial. Di Maggio couldn’t remember, when he spoke about it in 1993, the exact day in September 1987 he drove Riina to Salvo’s house, but he remembered everything else. He described with precision the concealed side entrance to the basement garage of No 3, and the private lift that ran from the garage directly to the Salvo apartment. He identified the man of honour called Rabito, Salvo’s personal driver and assistant, who’d met them at the garage gate and taken them up to the house. He described walking down a hall and being shown into a room on the right at the end of it. He and Riina had entered a sitting room suite with a parquet floor and a big carpet. On the left had been a large bookcase and a desk in dark wood. There’d been a sofa in front of the desk and another at right angles to it, and an armchair. On the other side he’d seen a table and chairs. The room had led out on to a large terrace and he’d seen a lot of plants growing there. The walls had been hung with paintings, he couldn’t remember of what, or their styles, which given his background as a car mechanic and killer wasn’t all that surprizing, and the windows with long heavy curtains. Sitting on the sofa he’d seen Ignazio Salvo. He’d seen the Hon. Salvo Lima and the Hon. Giulio Andreotti, whom I recognized without a shadow of doubt. They’d all stood up when Riina entered.
I shook hands with the parliamentarians and kissed Ignazio Salvo … Riina, on the other hand, kissed all three persons, Andreotti, Lima and Salvo.
This was The Kiss. Di Maggio had then gone back down the passage to wait with Rabito in another room. After three hours, perhaps three and a half, Ignazio Salvo had called him back to the sitting room, where he’d shaken hands again with Andreotti and Lima and left with Riina. On the way back in the car, Riina had made no mention as they chatted of what had passed between himself and Andreotti, but Di Maggio had had his own strong reasons for believing they’d talked about the maxitrial. He couldn’t really imagine the subject having been anything else, and he’d interpreted the kiss between Riina and Andreotti as a sign of respect … for as long as things went well. Back at the Friendship Festival, the Hon. Andreotti arrived with his security escort barely in time to address the faithful at six on the risk of mere pragmatism in politics.
I tried to imagine the scene Di Maggio described to the magistrates. The luxurious drawing room on a hot Sicilian summer afternoon. The small, hunched and fragile figure of the minister for foreign affairs rising from the sofa as the stocky and uncouth mass murderer entered the room. What’d passed through that subtle mind as they’d embraced? Andreotti had never been known for physical effusiveness. He was already sixty-eight then, but he’d little changed over the years. The long lipless downward curving mouth, the moneybox mouth hardly seemed made for kissing. He’d said once that he never recalled his widowed mother kissing him as a child, and the ways of affection are learnt. There was no trace in Andreotti of affection or carnality, no intimation of closeness. A friend of mine as an exuberant young woman in the early seventies once had the job of tottering across an exhibition hall in swimming costume and high heels and proffering to prime minister Andreotti a satin cushion bearing the ceremonial scissors he’d use to cut a ribbon and open an international trade fair. She’s never quite got over the lemonsucking narrow-eyed glare of disapproval the head of government shot her as he reached for the instrument. Andreotti’s voice was dry and small. Utterance was concise, formal, throwaway, deprecatory, minimalist. It was deliberately flat, clerical, ordinary, except for the intermittent verbal echoes and elaborations of the little flashes of malice and cynicism that glinted behind the lenses. These had earned him a reputation for irony.
He was a politician grown in the shelter of the Vatican, a government minister since his twenties who’d never had to ingratiate himself with the people he served. He’d never had to press the public flesh with those diaphanous hands. By the nineteen seventies, after sealing his alliance with Salvo Lima, he’d eliminated all challengers to the power he held, even if the party game and the parliamentary ritual had required a certain rotation of posts. He’d perfected a system that revolved around himself. He’d provoked admiration rather than affection in his followers, but this was never a minus. The famously sentimental Italians had always nursed a deeper feeling for the sly and heartless, for the diabolically clever. His admirers, at the height of his power, called him the god Giulio. Others called him Beelzebub, which of course was a more colourful name for Satan. Former men of honour said they’d known him as Uncle Giulio.
The person you had to imagine Andreotti embracing was eleven years younger and also short, formerly known indeed to his colleagues as Shorty, though stocky and a lot more robust. He’ll be even shorter when we’re through with him, they’d said in Palermo once, but they’d be
en wrong and very soon they were dead. He was a country person, a peasant from Corleone without formal education, who spoke limited Italian and hardly wrote at all. He’d used figures scribbled in a little notebook to run a multinational business with an annual turnover of many billions of dollars. His wife had studied Machiavelli at school, which might’ve helped hone the family management skills. A jovial figure and an expert cook, Uncle Totò Riina was said to have shown the strength of a bull when he throttled his guests after banquets. In his ten year rise to total power in Cosa Nostra, he’d killed or had killed eight hundred men of honour. In Cosa Nostra they’d stopped calling him Shorty and started calling him The Beast. He’d eliminated all challengers to the power he held and perfected a system that revolved around himself. What’d passed through that subtle mind as the two embraced?
On page 761 of The True History of Italy I found a section of seven pages on the meanings of the rituality of the greeting between Riina and Andreotti. It turned out to be a tiny sketch of Cosa Nostra and its relations with the Italian state. Unscrewing a plastic lampshade that fell into two pieces in my hand, in the full glare of the light shed by the fifteen watt bulb of the hotel reading lamp, I studied it. The kiss, Andreotti’s defence had submitted, was a hypothesis sailing through the rarefied atmosphere of the absurd. And since the kiss had become the image of the case against Andreotti, symbolic and concrete, The True History had to demonstrate that the notion of the vastly powerful man with the fine political mind kissing the illiterate peasant killer, Italy’s most wanted criminal, wasn’t at all absurd. That it was, in the circumstances, inevitable. First you had to acknowledge Cosa Nostra’s existence. The hardly trammeled growth of Cosa Nostra from the end of the war until the eighties had been enabled, the prosecutors said, by the state’s refusal to believe that the mafia existed as an organization, a refusal reflected in the attitudes and practices of criminal investigators and trial judges in mafia cases.
That a coherent overall picture of Cosa Nostra had never been articulated was no accident. Interested parties in the media, the judiciary, the church and in parliament had always been ready to muddy the waters, to dismiss the mafia as a literary chimera or communist propaganda or an insult against Sicily. Police practice and judicial practice, the very articles of the law, reflected a belief that Cosa Nostra didn’t exist. Nobody even knew its name until Tommaso Buscetta revealed it in 1984. And the police and magistrates who’d had open eyes and the wit to make sense of what they found had soon been identified as dangers and soon removed. Cesare Terranova, for instance, had known. When the Sicilian judge Leonardo Sciascia called an acute and implacable enemy of the mafia had returned from parliament in Rome in 1979 to head the investigative office in Palermo, he was murdered before he could start, shot in his car as he left home for work.
His tough and determined successor as chief prosecutor, Rocco Chinnici, had known too. He’d encouraged Falcone’s early investigations of the heroin traffic between the Asian golden triangle and Sicily, when a ship was seized in the Suez canal carrying two hundred and thirty-three kilos of refined heroin to Sicily. Chinnici spoke out against the mafia in schools and piazzas at a time when nobody else mentioned the word, and was blown up by a car bomb with two of his escort and a bystander in 1983. A few months earlier Ciaccio Montalto, another judge who’d known, had been shot in Trapani. The season of distinguished corpses was beginning in those first years of the eighties.
These murders were partly a sign of the growing strength of Riina’s brutal Corleonesi, though if Cosa Nostra had never killed magistrates before, it really hadn’t needed to. Chinnici had left a private diary when he died, that named names, recording his private suspicions and fears and accusing many of his colleagues in the Palermo justice building of complicity with Cosa Nostra. When this became known its contents were assimilated with hints that Chinnici had become paranoid. After the murders of these vigorous and intelligent magistrates, it seemed the final defeat for antimafia activism when a frail elderly magistrate on the verge of retirement called Antonino Caponnetto came down from Tuscany to replace his two murdered predecessors in Palermo, remarking that at sixty-three one should be used to living with the idea of death. Yet Caponnetto formed the antimafia pool with Falcone and Borsellino and the others, and the maxitrial verdict was the pool’s work, the final recognition in law that Cosa Nostra was a single body. All those magistrates had been murdered to prevent that.
The prosecutors of Andreotti underlined Cosa Nostra’s permanent aim of eliminating the historic memory built up by those few who’d understood that Cosa Nostra was a state within the state. Cosa Nostra, The True History reminded you, was a state organized territorially, divided into clans, governed by a central commission known as the Cupola at the apex of its pyramid and served by thousands of members at its base, who were controlled through rules and sanctions. It wasn’t an indistinct galaxy of criminal gangs, often at war among themselves and without a unified organization and leadership. Cosa Nostra was a state that maintained relations with professional, political and judicial representatives of that other state, the Italian republic.
This state within the state murdered the president of the regional government, the leader of the main opposition party, the provincial secretary of the main governing party, the prefect of Palermo, two chief state prosecutors, an advisory judge, two heads of the investigative police, two commanders of the carabinieri, the director general of the ministry of justice, a deputy prosecutor. It has also killed dozens of other citizens loyal to the state’s institutions, doctors, businessmen, magistrates, law enforcement officers and hundreds of ordinary people.
The anti-state of Cosa Nostra had featured
… in the darkest pages of the history of the republic from the end of the war to the present: the massacre of Portella della Ginestra, the BORGHESE coup d’etat attempt, the MORO kidnapping, the P2 affair, the CALVI case, the SINDONA case, etc.
When Totò Riina had entered the Salvo drawing room that summer afternoon, he’d entered as a head of that other state, and it was as such that the past and future leader of the Italian government had greeted him. It was a summit. They were Kennedy and Krushchev, Nixon and Mao, and thus the two leaders greeted each other.
At the time of The Kiss, the maxitrial had been going on for a year and a half, and it had only three months more to run. As the trial moved inexorably to its conclusion, the leaders of Cosa Nostra were becoming more and more perturbed. Two legal attempts to derail proceedings had failed. They’d challenged the presiding judge in April 1986, accusing him of partiality and misconduct two months into the trial. This had failed in the appeal court. Six months later defence lawyers had tried a kind of filibuster, requesting that all the documents on the case be read out in full in court. Since the prosecution’s case alone ran to nearly nine thousand pages, this would have prolonged the trial beyond the legal limit for preventive custody, and freed the hundreds of the accused mafiosi before the verdict was reached. In early 1987 the Italian parliament quickly passed a new law to prevent this happening. The DC, to the great anger of Cosa Nostra, had done nothing to stop this law being passed. At one point Cosa Nostra had decided to express their dissatisfaction with the feeble performance of their defence lawyers by waxing a few of them, pour encourager les autres, but the project stalled over which barristers to eliminate. Cosa Nostra was unhappiest of all with the demochristians who seemed to be doing nothing to impede or compromise the maxitrial. They hadn’t been given votes to do nothing. It was this that Giulio Andreotti had to answer for to Totò Riina that afternoon of The Kiss. Cosa Nostra wanted reassuring.
To teach the DC a lesson, Cosa Nostra had ordered a switch in votes in the 1987 elections, away from the DC. All the candidates supported by Cosa Nostra had been elected, and while the DC vote had increased in the rest of Italy, it’d fallen sharply in Palermo, in some central Palermo electorates dropping by more than half. It’d been a nasty little taste of a possible future for Andreotti, whose elect
oral strength in Sicily, assembled and mediated by Salvo Lima, was the source of his power. Lima himself, the man of honour who’d gone on from being mayor of Palermo to be Andreotti’s undersecretary of the budget in Rome, was in a delicate position by 1987, now that the Corleonesi had taken over Cosa Nostra. Lima had always dealt with the old guard, civilized mafiosi who’d understood the ways of mediation. He wasn’t known or trusted by the new bosses. The new Cosa Nostra did business differently and their dissatisfaction over the maxitrial had left Lima dangerously exposed. They’d been less flexible, less gracious than the mafiosi they’d eliminated. Stick to the agreement or we’ll kill you and your family, the new Cosa Nostra had told him. This was an overriding reason for Andreotti to respond to Riina’s request for a summit.
Italy’s most wanted criminal came without the slightest fear of arrest or entrapment. When he kissed Andreotti, a kiss the prosecutors described Andreotti as having undergone, Riina was taking the initiative and sending a complex message. It was a reassurance offered on Cosa Nostra’s own territory in a moment of crisis, prelude to a new understanding between the states. It must have been a relief. When he’d come down secretly to Palermo seven years earlier, to get an explanation for Cosa Nostra’s murder in 1980 of Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Sicilian regional government, Andreotti had been shouted at by the Palermo boss Stefano Bontate.